When it comes to our children--grown or otherwise--strong emotions roil through us, especially at points of passage: their birth, the first day of school and their leaving home for college. Whether we admit it or not, the latter is a big deal--the last big event that takes place under our protective roof, the transition from child to young adult, the end of our tenure as hands-on parents. It's hard to put in words just what and how much it means to us. And that's what I was looking for when I picked up Andre Aciman's recent essay in the New York Times, "The Day He Knew Would Come."
Aciman did not let me down. Written as his boys--twins and an older son--returned to college after the Christmas break, he ruminated on the stillness of his household. "..when you wake up in the morning, the kitchen is as clean as you left it last night. No one touched anything; no one stumbled in after partying till the wee hours to heat up leftovers, or cook a frozen pizza, or leave a mess on the counter while improvising a sandwich. The boys are away now."
He also takes note of the up side of life as an empty nester. "All things slow down to what their pace had been two decades earlier. My wife and I are rediscovering things we didn’t even know we missed. We can stay out as long as we wish, go away on weekends, travel abroad, have people over on Sunday night, even go to the movies when we feel like it, and never again worry about doing laundry after midnight because the boys refuse to wear the same jeans two days in a row."
One point that had especial resonance for me was his realization that he now had time to reacquaint himself with himself. "Months after they'd left, I finally realized that the one relationship I had neglected for so many years was none other than my relationship with myself. I missed myself. I and me had stopped talking, stopped meeting, lost touch, drifted apart. Now, 20 years later, we were picking up where we’d left off and resumed unfinished conversations."
I had a similar epiphany--not as well or deeply articulated perhaps--but, like Aciman, it came a few months after my children left the nest. It was a sudden realization that I was now number one, Numero Uno. Decisions on what movies to see, what to prepare for dinner, where to go for a vacation--I could now afford to think of myself first. Twenty years of child-rearing tends to drop you to the bottom of the "what do you want" list. During the years my children lived at home with paterfamilias and me (and even now, when they return for a visit), I was happiest when everyone else was at peace with whatever decision had been made. It wasn't all that easy readjusting to the new reality. I had to, as Aciman put it, pick up where I left off and resume unfinished conversations.
Let me end with another comment from Aciman: "The best thing is learning how to give thanks for what we have. And at Christmas I was thankful; their bedroom doors were open again."